CLIENT CASE STUDY

Performance Achievement

Technology helps Accenture people achieve their best performance.

TIME TO REIMAGINE

Accenture had a long-standing performance management model that has driven an innovation-led business with an inspired culture. The model, however, was built when the company was primarily a consulting organization in a less global and digital environment. To continue building on its culture of innovation, while reflecting the differentiation of its businesses, the future work environment and the demographics of its workforce, Accenture set out to reimagine performance management for the company.

A program was created in December 2014 to move from “managing” performance to “achieving” performance. A year of experimentation followed, with the new program implemented in 2016. For Accenture IT, this new program presented the opportunity to develop a new, online performance tool on a digital platform and replace the existing performance management tool, yet leverage reusable components in the process.

INNOVATING AT SPEED AND SCALE

Accenture Human Resources began designing Performance Achievement, a new performance management approach. It was designed and developed in collaboration with Accenture’s internal IT; Fjord, part of Accenture Interactive; and early adopter groups. HR and Fjord focused on applying human-centered design to the concepts, while internal IT partnered with HR in developing the functional and technical requirements.

Internal IT assessed the marketplace for packaged solutions, but with no product existing that would meet this project’s unique requirements, internal IT turned to building a solution. Development had to be done quickly to meet HR’s tight timeline. To support this objective, a core internal IT team started with three main tenants:

Stay on the leading edge architecturally, to align toward Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and allow for fast development and experimentation.

Move toward use of micro services.

Be cloud-first.

The team applied these tenants to the design and front-end custom development. For the back end, the team leveraged Accenture’s experience with Amazon Web Services to use a PaaS offering that was a fit. This approach enabled moving away from a traditionally structured database, and instead moving toward the use of unstructured databases. This leading-edge architecture supported micro services and the PaaS offering, which enabled the internal IT team to maximize time spent in meaningful discussions about this program’s focus—Accenture people. It also allowed the teams to be fast and agile, helping to meet the aggressive timeline set by leadership.

The solution started as a pilot among early adopters, whose feedback fed into further development. Development continued in an Agile manner, with no-downtime releases deployed monthly. New features and changes were continually deployed into production. Performance Achievement was launched with three core elements in the tool, and over the next nine months, the remaining elements were launched. A final step was introducing integration with a related application, Total Rewards, enabling talent discussion information to be sent in automated feeds to the Total Rewards teams for determining employee compensations. The technology solution was completed by October 2016, meeting the HR timeline.

PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST

Tremendous teaming and collaboration led to the successful deployment of a successful service and Performance Achievement experience to a global population of approximately 400,000 Accenture employees. The application experiences on average more than 70,000 visits a day. Over the course of the project, the teams deployed more than 12 major releases, developed 20 micro services and deployed more than 4,000 times with zero downtime.

THE PERFORMANCE ACHIEVEMENT JOURNEY

Listen to Accenture managing directors Jason Warnke and Kush Jhawar discuss how technology is helping Accenture people achieve their best performance.

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